Posts tagged “Visual Studio”

Visual Studio Tools for Git has “crossed a significant threshold of completeness and usability” with its latest release.

That’s according to Microsoft Technical Fellow Brian Harry, who announced the upgrade on his blogtoday. The key improvements, he wrote, are performance increases, better functioning for large code repositories and fewer merge and pull conflicts for developers working simultaneously on projects.

Note that the most important requirement to get the update is to have the latest version of Visual Studio, which is Visual Studio 2012 Update 2.

In terms of speed increases, Harry published a chart that showed dramatic increases between the Git client tooling for the new release (Sprint 46) and the previous public release, Sprint 44. For example, pulling 100 1KB files decreased from a typical time of 83 seconds to five seconds, and pushing 100 commits up to Git dropped from 76 seconds to 12 seconds.

Visual Studio Tools for Git is a Team Explorer add-on that provides source control integration for Git, enabling integration with any local Git repository and tools to work with third-party-hosted Git repositories. The last update of Visual Studio Tools for Git was in March.

Developers working with Xamarin MonoTouch have been stuck with developing on a Macintosh and working with MonoDevelop. This hasn’t been a bad thing. The Apple iOS SDK only runs on the Mac, so this requirement hasn’t been a major limiting factor in iOS development.

Unfortunately, .NET and C# developers are used to using Visual Studio. Microsoft has spent a lot of time, effort and money to make Visual Studio the premier software development tool in existence. Xamarin Inc. has heard from those developers who want to integrate Visual Studio with iOS development. On Feb. 20, Xamarin introduced Xamarin.iOS for Visual Studio. This plug-in allows developers using Visual Studio to write iPhone and iPad applications for the iPhone using the Microsoft .NET Framework and C#.

In the few days since we announced Visual Studio and Team Foundation Service support for Git, it’s been exciting to see so much interest, along with a lot of great feedback and questions. We will take your feedback to help us guide how we evolve the tools and the service; so please keep it coming. And as for the questions, we hope that you will find in this post some answers to help you make the most of our Git tools in Visual Studio and our Git service in TFS.

Both client and server are standard implementations of Git. Our client will work with pretty much any Git repository – local, enterprise, Codeplex, GitHub, BitBucket, …. And TFS will work with pretty much any Git client – existing Git command lines, XCode, Eclipse’s Git support, …. This was a core principle from day 1. This is not about lock in – it’s about providing a good and interoperable Git capability. From Git init VS

In this post we will demonstrate Visual Studio’s flexibility to help you get your work done in the places you need to do it: locally, on TFS, or on a third-party service such as those Brian mentions above.

Create a new solution under local Git version control

Put an existing solution under local Git version control

If you’ve already got a solution in which you’ve been tinkering on your local dev machine, before you tinker any further, why not go ahead and add it to a lightweight local Git version control repository?

Now that your repository is created, go ahead and commit your files.

Add an existing local repository

Maybe you’ve got other repositories you’ve been using with other client tools. Regardless of whether the local repo has a remote or not, you can add it and then work with it in Visual Studio. You can add a single repo at a time, or, as we show below, point Visual Studio at a directory that contains multiple repositories and add them all in one shot.

After you add the repository, you can open it and get to work in Visual Studio.

BTW, notice that nifty "Open in Command Prompt" command? Eventually you will likely need it to perform some tasks. If you don’t already have command-line tools installed, you can install some:

We’ll talk more about common scenarios for using these tools in a future post.

Clone a remote Git repository to your dev machine

Doesn’t matter where your Git repository is hosted: TFS, CodePlex, GitHub, Bitbucket, or somewhere else. You can use Visual Studio to work with it. To begin collaborating with others on code in a remote repository, you clone it to your dev machine.

Clone a TFS Git repository to your dev machine

Whether you are new to a team project or just setting up a new dev machine, to get working in a Git team project, clone it to your dev machine.

Clone a third-party Git repository to your dev machine

Does your team have some code in GitHub or another service such as CodePlex or Bitbucket? You can clone the code down to your dev machine and get working in Visual Studio.

Publish your local repository

When you are ready to begin sharing some code on your dev machine with others, you publish the branch to the remote repository.

Manage your connections

The Connect page is a new feature in Visual Studio 2012 Update 2. From here you can see and manage all the version control repositories you care about.

Just right-click the repository you want to work and then choose Open or another command.

Tell us what you think

We are experimenting with ways to be more agile and effective in delivering guidance to you. We welcome your feedback not only on our new Git capabilities, but also on the content and format of this post. As we noted above, stay tuned for a few more posts coming on topics such as working with command-line tools, and adjusting Git settings. Thanks for your time and for trying out Visual Studio and TFS with Git!